What is archilles CLAUDE.md?

Project instructions for Archilles, a local search system for Calibre e-book libraries. It indexes books and supports keyword, meaning-based, and combined searches with citations.

Installing, indexing, searching, checking, and running the Archilles project.

They give an agent the project commands, conventions, and limits it needs to work safely in the repository.

How kasssandr/archilles configures Claude Code

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to kasssandr/archilles. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kasssandr/archilles/main/CLAUDE.md

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kasssandr/archilles

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/kasssandr/archilles/claude-md/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/kasssandr/archilles/claude-md)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/kasssandr/archilles/claude-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/kasssandr/archilles/claude-md/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/kasssandr/archilles/claude-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/kasssandr/archilles/claude-md.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 1,435 This file is loaded in full into every session.

When invoked 1,435 The same file — it is already loaded in full.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.01435	$0.01435
Opus 5.5	$0.00574	$0.00574
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00287	$0.00287
Haiku 4.5	$0.00144	$0.00144

Measured 1mo ago against content hash bc9fef34df30, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

archilles CLAUDE.md scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 1mo ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

CLAUDE.md · 117 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 117 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

CLAUDE.md

This file provides guidance to Claude Code (claude.ai/code) when working with code in this repository.

Project Overview

ARCHILLES is a privacy-first, local-first RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system for semantic search across Calibre e-book libraries. It provides hybrid vector+BM25 search with academic-grade citations, MCP integration for Claude Desktop; it will provide MCP intergration for other LLMs soon, and finally a Streamlit web UI.

Commands

Installation

pip install -r requirements.txt

Indexing

python scripts/rag_demo.py index "/path/to/book.pdf" --book-id "AuthorName"
python scripts/batch_index.py --tag "Your-Tag" [--dry-run] [--skip-existing]

Searching

python scripts/rag_demo.py query "search term" [--mode hybrid|semantic|keyword]
python scripts/rag_demo.py query "text" --language de --tag-filter History
python scripts/rag_demo.py stats
python scripts/rag_demo.py list-indexed

Web UI

streamlit run scripts/web_ui.py

MCP Server (Claude Desktop)

python mcp_server.py

Conventions

Language in code: English only

All source code — comments, docstrings, identifiers, log/error messages and test prose — is written in English. This keeps the public repository consistent and accessible to contributors who don't read German.

German is allowed only where it is data, not code:

User-facing / locale strings: translations and language-specific content (e.g. src/archilles/i18n.py, the German locale entries in kindle_provider.py).
Docs under docs/: DECISIONS.md (the German Entscheidungsarchiv), ROADMAP.md, etc. are intentionally German.

Note: parts of the codebase still carry German comments/docstrings from before this rule. New or touched code must be English; a repo-wide cleanup is a separate task.

Architecture

Non-obvious constraints and entry points (the rest of the layout is best read from the code):

src/calibre_db.py — Read-only access to Calibre's metadata.db (SQLite). This is an absolute boundary: never write to the Calibre library.
src/service/archilles_service.py — Single facade used by MCP server, web UI, and CLI. Start here when adding new features.
src/archilles/engine/ — Core RAG engine (ArchillesRAG facade composing Indexer, Searcher, PromptBuilder). Start here for engine changes.
Scriptor seam — archilles-scriptor is a hard runtime dependency, one direction only. A bundle under <library>/.archilles/scriptor/<key>/ replaces a book's text source (Indexer._text_source), never its identity. src/extractors/scriptor_extractor.py reads it, scripts/scriptor_prepare.py builds it (ADR-032).
src/calibre_mcp/server.py — MCP server. Carefully manages stdout/stderr: any stray write corrupts the JSON-RPC protocol.

Read the full file on GitHub · 117 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

1mo ago Changed · +1 lines · +94 tokens per session bc9fef34df30
2mo ago First seen · 116 lines · 1,341 tokens per session scan A 7bdfa7cd0875

Subscribe to this mod's changes

archilles CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository kasssandr/archilles (9 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 1,435 tokens to every session, about $0.0057 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

Research academic-research calibre digital-humanities embeddings historical-research local-ai

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archilles: Instructions file for Claude Code